Language, Gender, and Identity

This video examines language, gender, identity, social positioning, and performativity from a non-essentialist sociolinguistic perspective. Rather than assuming that men and women naturally speak in fixed ways, students learn to analyse identity as socially constructed, relational, and interactionally accomplished through resources such as stance, register, address terms, code choice, turn-taking, style, and multimodality. The video introduces positioning, community of practice, gender as practice, stereotypes, intersecting identities, participant uptake, counter-reading, and reflexivity, encouraging students to base interpretations on observable evidence rather than predetermined social categories.